ABOUT OUR PROJECT
|Summary| Benefits| Transferability| Procedure| Recognition| Participants|
Our project sound bite is Learning through doing.
Our project Discover Bucharest focuses on providing information about the natural and man made attractions in our hometown. Bucharest has so much history and culture to share that we wanted to showcase it as completely as possible. We have created this travel guide which is both child and adult friendly in order to promote our city and persuade people to visit it and discover its beauty and rich culture.
Old churches and monasteries, art galleries, parks and gardens, heritage attractions, entertainment places, shopping centres, traditional restaurants and quality hotels are all waiting to be discovered!
Apart from photos (taken by us) and information about the sights in Bucharest, we have also
included some tips for tourists, a language section (where you can hear the
Romanian pronunciation), an interactive quiz about Bucharest and some
interviews. There are also the results of a poll. For more information about our
poll, see the Interview section of our web site.
Thanks to this web-based project we had the opportunity to enrich our cultural knowledge, get to know our community better and improve our communication skills. It also gave us self-confidence in our computer and writing skills as well as meaningful practice. Besides, this project provided opportunities for us to use the knowledge we gained in other school subjects (Geography, History, Social Studies, English, Romanian and Computer Science). Moreover, by working together (students, teachers, parents, grandparents and local members) we all improved our social skills: sharing, learning etc.
This web based project gave us opportunities for realistic translation work. A lot of the source material (leaflets, brochures, texts from reference books etc.) was in Romanian. Besides, we interviewed some of the people in our native language but reported our findings in English. Learning grammar and vocabulary appeared more relevant to us because we needed these things for our project. We all learned from one another during the project and discovered many interesting facts about our local and wider community.
By creating this web-based project we also contributed to achieving two of our institution's policy objectives, namely implementing New Technologies in the teaching-learning process in order to prepare our students for their future careers and collaborating with our local and wider community. Besides, our school also promotes group projects and projects involving IT.
To sum up, while working on this project we learned how to collaborate with fellow students and our community, to conduct research, to create a web project, to be ambassadors to showcase our work.
We found it a rich and rewarding experience!
Transferability
We believe that our web-based project which is both child and adult friendly will inspire other students and teachers worldwide to become 'ambassadors' for their own local communities by working collaboratively with community members and using the Internet to publish a web site that showcases what they have learned.
We have worked on our project during the optional English course.
We have contacted and talked to many people in our community through e-mail, phone calls or in person in order to accomplish our project.
Groups of children from each class ( for more information see the Acknowledgement section) have collected information about natural and man made attractions (in their local or wider community) by:
- visiting different places (together with their teachers and parents),
- interviewing many people, sending and receiving e-mails,
- reading brochures, leaflets, newspapers, magazines, books. We have also searched the Internet or different CD-ROMs for relevant information about our hometown. For more information, see the Bibliography section of our project.
In March 2004 Cosmin Bebu (7th grade A) presented this project at the Europe 2004 workshop where it was highly appreciated. Representatives of the pupils and teachers from each school within our sector (Bucharest is divided into 6 sectors) participated in that workshop with different projects. Our project was the only web-based one. See the feedback section for more details.
In May 2004 we received an electronic diploma (honourable mention) issued by the International Schools CyberFair 2004 in acknowledgement of our work on this web-based project.
In June 2004 Mrs. Nela Nicoleta Stan (member of the Democratic Party and counselor at the City Hall, sector 6) congratulated us on our web-based project on behalf of the mayor of Bucharest and the president of the Democratic Party, Mr. Traian Basescu. For more details, see the Feedback section.
About 130 students from our school (assisted by their teachers, parents, grandparents and other community members) worked together to create this web-based project by March 2006.
Many thanks to the following schools: Izvoarele, Tiganesti, Zimnicele (Teleorman county), Salva (Transylvania), Oporelu (Olt county) and School No.8 (Giurgiu). On the 24th of June 2004 they were all present at the Village and Folk Art Museum where the pupils (assisted by their teachers) from these schools performed wonderful Romanian folk dances. They also provided us with information about them. Thanks to them we could create the Special Events section.
For more details about all the people involved in our web-based project, see the Acknowledgement section .